Marriage in Culture: Practice and Meaning Across Diverse Cultures

Marriage in Culture: Practice and Meaning Across Diverse Cultures. Janice E. Stockard. 2002. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt College Publishers. 129 pages. $25.95.

This short book provides an informative and fascinating introduction to the cross-cultural study of marriage and kinship. I recommend it to instructors who want to introduce students to family diversity around the globe and throughout history. It is an excellent resource for courses on gender, marriage, and family, but also to the introduction to sociology and social stratification courses. The few problems I see in the book are related to its conceptualization of "diversity."

The book's introduction extols the virtues of anthropology's holistic approach and ethnographic method. Stockard explains that anthropology requires examining all the elements of culture, like economics and religion, in unison to understand the relationships between these variables and the practice and meaning of marriage. In chapter one, the author briefly discusses theoretical traditions that inform the analysis: economic and ecological anthropology, neo-Marxism, British social anthropology, Bourdieu's practice theory, and gender theory. Stockard selectively draws on and weaves ideas from these perspectives into her text. This makes for a fascinating and seamless read, but might frustrate those want a more systematic and extended treatment of the distinct contributions that different perspectives can make.

The next four chapters are portraits of four societies: the !Kung San (sometimes known to Westerners as the Kalahari "Bushmen"), traditional Chinese society of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the historical Iroquois society, and the Nyinba of Nepal. Each case is selected to reveal variations along a number of cultural dimensions. How old are brides and grooms when they get married? Who arranges the union? With whom do they live? How many spouses ought a man or a woman have? How are lineages traced, and what counts as incest? To what extent are marital relations, and social relations in general, stratified?

Case studies reveal incredible variation in how different cultures organize marriage and kinship. Some readers might be fascinated with the Nyinba, who practice a form of polyandry. For the Nyinba, the natural thing to do is for the brothers of a household to invite one woman to come and live with them as husbands and wife. Nyinba men and women earnestly desire that kind of...